Published on 15-Feb-2006
Validated on 01 Jun 2009
"The IBM and SAP solution gives NORDMILCH the flexible IT infrastructure and applications required to meet our business goals." - Karl-Heinz Mansholt, Chief Information Officer, NORDMILCH
Customer:
NORDMILCH eG
Industry:
Consumer Products
Deployment country:
Germany
Solution:
Enterprise Resource Planning, Optimizing IT, Virtualization
IBM Business Partner:
SAP
Overview
NORDMILCH, based in Bremen, Germany, produces every type of refined dairy product such as cheeses, cream, long-life milk, dried powdered milks and yogurts. The company has sales of more than €2.1 billion, and employs around 3,800 people.
Business need:
Faced with intense competition and growing demands for product information from customers, NORDMILCH wanted to reduce costs, increase flexibility and introduce ever-better production quality control. Existing IT systems for hosting the SAPsolutions could not support these aims.
Solution:
In cooperation with IBM Global Services, NORDMILCH created a solution based on IBM DB2 Universal Database, IBM eServer p5 servers and the IBM TotalStorage DS8000 storage servers. The new infrastructure enables additional processors to be activated to handle peaks in demand, providing a flexible system able to handle new SAP software functionality at low operational costs.
Benefits:
A scalable, expandable system that has the capacity for tomorrow’s expected workloads while being sized and costed for today’s requirements. The total costs of operation are lower than those of the older system, performance and reliability have both improved, and NORDMILCH is able to take advantage of advanced SAP software features for better business management.
Case Study
auf Deutsch
Building new capabilities
NORDMILCH, based in Bremen, Germany, produces every type of refined dairy product such as cheeses, cream, long-life milk, dried powdered milks and yogurts. The company has sales of more than €2.1 billion, and employs around 3,800 people.
The company was committed to SAP software as its core suite of business management solutions. To meet the need to provide more detailed production data for health and safety reasons, NORDMILCH management wanted to implement additional SAP solutions and upgrade their existing SAP applications. The company was also growing, and the existing Sun and EMC² hardware supporting the SAP software had run to the end of its life.
Karl-Heinz Mansholt, Chief Information Officer at NORDMILCH, describes the strategy: “To meet our business objectives, we selected SAP software. To run new SAP applications successfully, we needed a new approach to our IT infrastructure. We did not want to over-invest in servers that would be over-sized in the beginning, and invited several vendors to propose possible solutions.”
Reviewing the options
The review of the physical systems included both servers and storage, and NORDMILCH was also considering the role of its Informix database. The planned new SAP applications did not support Informix, and a long-term replacement would be needed.
NORDMILCH compared offers from IBM partners, FSC and Sun (for the hardware) and from IBM and Oracle (for the database). Karl-Heinz Mansholt and his team analysed factors such as ease of administration, maintenance, database performance, scalability and reliability.
“In an internal cost-benefit analysis, the IBM proposal – p5 servers, DS8100 storage server and DB2 database – was the winner by far. Not only was the total offer price lower, but also IBM included the essential migration skills and expertise for the change to DB2 UDB. The prospect of deploying the advanced capabilities of logical partitions (LPARs) in AIX offered additional benefits."
IT and business aligned
NORDMILCH has implemented new SAP applications for Materials Management (MM), Sales and Distribution (SD), Financials / Controlling (FI/CO), Human Resources (HR) and Production Planning (PP).
The SAP software runs on two IBM p5 model 570 servers running the IBM AIX 5L operating system. The servers are located in separate data centres, clustered using VERITAS Cluster Server technology to provide near-continuous operations even in the unlikely event of a failure on one server.
“The huge advantage with the IBM solution is that NORDMILCH pays only for the capacity we require. Each p5 has eight processors installed, of which four are activated – and NORDMILCH pays only for those four. We are able to activate the additional processors to meet sudden workload demands, which allows us to match the IT capabilities more precisely to the changing needs of the business.
“With the virtualized p5 solution, containing logical partitions, NORDMILCH has gained greater performance and higher scalability, without the need to over-invest in system capacity. Our decisions today are designed to provide the IT infrastructure for at least five years; the IBM p5 systems give us the flexibility our business requires,” says Karl-Heinz Mansholt.
Rethinking data storage
With the new server strategy being very promising, NORDMILCH also wanted the same scalability and flexibility from its storage systems and database solutions.
“The support from IBM Global Services and the migration proposal made the switch to IBM DB2 UDB the logical choice,” says Karl-Heinz Mansholt. “Informix and DB2 UDB are similar in some ways, which reduces the training requirement in the transition. IBM Global Services provided the complete migration including database migration, and subsequent training for NORDMILCH.
“The DB2 database performance is excellent, and reliability is outstanding. Once you start running DB2 UDB, it keeps running!”
Several different options were considered for the storage infrastructure, including the incumbent vendor, EMC. NORDMILCH chose an IBM TotalStorage DS8100 storage server, providing high-performance storage resources for both p5-570 servers. Hardware implementation including a SAN redesign was through IBM Business Partner Comparex.
Combined benefits
“Regarding the transition to the new DB2 database and migration to the new p5-570 and storage servers, co-operation between IBM Global Services and Comparex was excellent,” says Karl-Heinz Mansholt. “NORDMILCH is highly satisfied with the performance of the new SAP applications on p5 and DS8100, with greatly improved response times and the ability to scale up to meet demand exactly as required.
“The improved technical performance is down to the combination of hardware, AIX operating system, database and storage – it’s very hard to split the benefits between these components. In summary, the IBM and SAP solution gives NORDMILCH the flexible IT infrastructure and applications required to meet our business goals.”
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Hardware:
Storage: DS8000, System p, System p: eServer p5 570
Software:
DB2 Data Servers, DB2 9 for Linux, UNIX and Windows
Operating system:
AIX 5L
Legal Information
IBM Deutschland GmbH D-70548 Stuttgart ibm.com/solutions/sap IBM, the IBM logo, the eServer logo, TotalStorage, zSeries, iSeries, pSeries, xSeries, z/OS, z/VM, i5/OS, AIX, DB2, DB2 Universal Database, Domino, Lotus, Tivoli, WebSphere and Enterprise Storage Server are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Intel, Intel logo, Intel Inside, Intel Inside logo, Intel Centrino, Intel Centrino logo, Celeron, Intel Xeon, Intel SpeedStep, Itanium, and Pentium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both. Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT, and the Windows logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Other company, product or service names may be trademarks, or service marks of others. This case study illustrates how one IBM customer uses IBM and/or IBM Business Partner technologies/services. Many factors have contributed to the results and benefits described. IBM does not guarantee comparable results. All information contained herein was provided by the featured customer and/or IBM Business Partner. IBM does not attest to its accuracy. All customer examples cited represent how some customers have used IBM products and the results they may have achieved. Actual environmental costs and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. This publication is for general guidance only. Photographs may show design models. © Copyright IBM Corp. 2006 All Rights Reserved. © Copyright 2006 SAP AG SAP AG Neurottstraße 16 D-69190 Walldorf SAP, the SAP logo, mySAP and all other SAP products and services mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and several other countries.